One Day Your Voice Will Become Mine: On Kalehua Kim’s Mele

Mele
Kalehua Kim
Trio House Press, 2025

Open the vibrant coral cover of Kalehua Kim’s debut poetry collection, Mele, and you will find horses in dreams. You will find red lips, phone calls bearing the worst of news, utterances caught in the throat, a heart that “blooms a sacred tulip.” You will find blushing mangoes, soiled clothes, boiled peanuts, chickens who “slip on sheets of moss,” and so much green—ti leaves, eyeshadow, bedspreads. You will find laughter, the lilt of Hawaiian Pidgin, the sway of ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i, stray lines from the Bee Gees and Peaches & Herb. You will find music–sounds, singing, “voices that blend”—what is heard, what is told, what echoes within memory.

At the heart of Mele is the grief of maternal loss. Early in the book, the speaker asks her mother in hospice: “How can I, your only daughter, mend anything?/ How can I, your only daughter, be mended?” Radiating from this center are phases of daughterhood and motherhood; the daily domestic; what distance does to the heart; the relation not only of mother and daughter, but also, father and daughter, grandmother and granddaughter, auntie and niece. This book is a palimpsest, an encapsulation of influences. Here are the remnants we collect from our loved ones, from our days, the bits of dialogue, the stories, images, and small gestures that mold us. How can we mend and be mended? Through the attempt, the insistence, to forget nothing.

When I first met Kalehua Kim in person, her warmth radiated, her generosity instantly apparent. I hesitate to call this a maternal instinct, as I wasn’t aware Kim was a mother until much later. For me, it felt like an embrace between two Native Hawaiian poets in diaspora. I felt the instantaneous draw towards someone who understands the tug of home, who understands that home is not only a place, but people, and that when those people are lost, our sense of home and our sense of self fall into question.

In Mele, Kim draws deeply from her Hawaiian heritage and culture. The book’s architecture, Kim notes, borrows “from song structures found in many Hawaiian songs or hulas,” while the title of the book means song, chant, or poetry in ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i. Cultural identity is inextricable from these poems and the shaping of the mother-daughter relationship at the book’s core. In Hawai‘i, storytelling is ubiquitous, the ‘āina saturated with mo‘olelo, oral narratives, legends, and myths passed down for generations, the tradewinds buoying casual talk-story on afternoons and late nights spent in good company. The act and art of storytelling—through song, through anecdote, through family lore—surfaces over and over again.

Repetition itself is a throughline in the book. Forms like the ghazal and duplex, where repetition is inherent to the verse structure, are put to deft use: they are both accommodating of and complicated by their content. In “A Heart (In)Action,” a ghazal where the speaker ponders the imminent loss of her dying mother, “heart” is the refrain. But Kim subverts formal expectations, enjambing the lines and departing from the more traditional ghazal with autonomous couplets. This tension between form and content signals that a loss of this magnitude cannot be contained. And indeed, this is the topic at hand, that anticipatory grief is excessive, overbearing:

I hold your hand that can no longer hold mine.
Pressure builds, forces the chambers of my heart

to implode with a rush of feeling, a gush without a gash.
My ribs splay open, jagged fingers reaching for a heart

just out of reach. My lungs expand and contract
too quickly, a red balloon stretched thin, a heart

deflated and limp on the ground, still tethered to
a white ribbon around my wrist where some heart

pulses, beats a frantic rhythm against my skin.
How can you mend a broken heart?

Repetition—in music, in oral tradition, in practice—has a cognitive function: it helps to reinforce our remembering. In this poem and this collection, I also see repetition as an act of care. Repetition as a return, or an effort to return, to that which has been lost. How does a long-lasting love manifest if not through repetition? Repetition shapes a life, and the rupture or break from this repetition can change it irrevocably. But then, again, repetition—the loss becomes familiar, each day of the aftermath part of a new cycle.

In “Hā” (translated as the breath of life), Kim conjures repetition through anadiplosis, where end-phrases from preceding lines begin the following lines:

when I was born I was a girl
I was a girl with a cord wrapped around my neck
I had a cord wrapped around my neck and no breath
I had no breath because until that moment, no one had hit me
no one had hit me and it took time to unravel the cord
it took time to unravel the cord but I feel its weight every day

This recursive leaping back and forth feels mimetic of breath, the poem’s very subject. Before the speaker can take the next breath, the previous breath is still lingering, a half-life of the exhalation within the inhalation. We begin with an absence of breath, and the relationality that brought it forth—“I had no breath because until that moment, no one had hit me”. In the last lines of the poem, a different type of repetition announces the volta:

unwrap the cord around your neck
unwrap the time it takes to catch your breath
catch your breath
catch your breath
that is your voice

The anaphora of “unwrap” disrupts the anadiplosis, and we are brought to the repetition of “catch your breath”, then, “that is your voice.” Here, there is a realization, a self-sufficiency, a departure from that relationality at the poem’s start. No breath becomes breath becomes voice.

But whose voices resonate in our ears, speaking to us from beyond the confines of linear time and space? We do not get a singular voice in Mele; many are represented—all family—making it a truly polyvocal book. In the persona poem “After the Funeral, I Dream That My Mother Tells Me Her Dreams,” we meet the speaker’s mother, whose voice evokes the musicality of Hawaiian Pidgin, or Hawai‘i Creole English. The speaker’s mother recounts seeing her own mother in a dream, establishing a pattern of return between mother and daughter in the unconscious: “My maddah, she came so quiet, / she nevah have to say notin’. / She jus wait, she wait fo’ me, yah? // An I goin’ wait da same kine.” In “My Mother’s Voice Echoes with Mine,” a contrapuntal where lines from a letter written by Kim’s mother are interspersed with the poet’s own, we see these voices come together and tell multiple stories at once. Or, perhaps, reveal how many voices must come together to tell one story.

In this polyvocality, we can see memory and storytelling as collective efforts. A trio of sonnets—“Memory Sonnet,” “My Father’s Sonnet,” and “My Mother’s Sonnet”—leverage different perspectives to tell the story of the speaker’s parents’ relationship. “Memory Sonnet” features our primary speaker, uncomfortable in her father’s house one summer, his “silence, humid and thick as thunder.” When asked about how the speaker’s parents first met, her father responds that they met at the bus company, then reflects on her mother’s singing: “‘She used to sing, yah? Ho, da voice she got,/ in da house, in my hed, an in my haht.’” His voice continues in “My Father’s Sonnet,” recalls how he first asked the speaker’s mother to go out with him: “I wen ask her out fas’ kine, I nevah like nobody / go out wid her but me.” In “My Mother’s Sonnet” we glimpse their relationship after its dissolution, the speaker’s mother narrating, “Your father said he wanted to be free.” It’s notable, too, that of the three sonnets, “My Mother’s Sonnet” is the only one to follow Shakespearean rhyme scheme; despite the heartbreak and her sober tone, the lasting music of this singer’s voice perseveres: “He and I sat at the dining table/ where I fidgeted with my wedding band, / where he rewrote our family fable.” Their split path is the wound, but also the splitting of their shared story—how he has rewritten it without her, written her out of it.

Stories are not only shaped by the teller, but also by those to whom they are told. In an oral tradition, stories passed down from one generation to the next always carry with them the nuance and interpretation of new generations of storytellers, the ones who now hold and retell the story. In Mele, Kim reconstitutes the voices, songs, and stories of her life, holding them to honor her mother and past generations, and to make space for her children, the next generation. I always respect the distance between a poet and a poem’s speaker though this distance is collapsed when looking at the first and last poems in Mele, both with epigraphs that contain dedications to the poet’s mother. In these poems—“Ka Hale, the Nurturing Place” and “Seated Beside Happiness”—the speaker directly addresses her mother. These points of entry and exit, the intro and outro, are grounding. While the poems in Mele may enter into that liminal realm of lyric imagination, they come back down to settle in the earth, in the hale, the home. “Lift your stories from my ear / to fill this house, Ka Hale”, the speaker says to her mother, or perhaps, towards her mother. This, too, is Kim’s tender, poetic act—lifting stories from her ear to ours, filling our houses with longing and loss, with love that continues on, reverberating, alive.